MEMPHIS TO MEMPHIS ig
Do you suppose we would take an unintellectual Philistine
. . . yes, Philistine ... to any place in Italy. Let alone
San Remo!"
That seemed to settle the matter. . . . Any little waspish
girl can always suppress any little boy a year older than
herself; and as my cousin threatened to bring in my aunt
to suppress me altogether I gave up thinking about that
convulsion of the earth. I came, indeed, gradually to the
conviction that I must simply have imagined palms and
bathing pavilion and quotations from Dante.
Even as a little boy I knew that I had the trick of imagin-
ing things and that those things would be more real to me
than the things that surrounded me. So that by the age of
eleven I must have voyaged much further than Columbus,
voyaging being the thing that most engrossed me at that
day.
My nurse's grandson, Walter Atterbury, and I made the
most astounding voyages on the Spanish Main—in the
kitchen table turned upside down. I do not remember having
actually discovered America . . . though, when I come
to think of it, I may actually have been the man who first
from Cristoforo's crosstrees cried: "Land ho!" . . .
Certainly I watched Captain Kidd bury his treasure and
equally certainly I heard Nelson say; "Kiss me, Hardy,"
at the end of Trafalgar day. I heard it, you understand,
more clearly than I now hear the wind in my olive trees.
"... Why, there was in the cockpit of the Victory a piping
bullfinch that was excited by the perpetual rumble of gun-
fire and piped hymn tune after hymn tune, returning always
to the Doxology. Until, after the dim eyes of the hero closed
for good, someone threw a cloth over his cage to silence
him. . . . You did not know that detail, perhaps. No one
else ever did but I. ...
So to have been beneath a shelter formed by an inclined
sail, beneath palm branches, seemed nothing singular to me. *
I was ready to admit even to myself that the experience had
been nothing more than a vision, though, even at this
moment of writing, the landscape—the bathing pavilion
with its bluish windows and my uncle in his bathrobe